“Here in Jamaica, there is just not enough honesty regarding the guns that have been here since the 1970s and 1980s. Furthermore, I am tired of the grand narratives about missing fathers when, in many of the hotspots, the young ‘shottas’ were well coached by their fathers who passed on their trade to them. Many of these fathers were facilitated by paternalistic politicians who never reclaimed the guns they distributed. Truth is, Jamaican politicians did help to undermine the legitimacy of the police.” (Dr Orville Taylor, UWI sociologist)
When I read Dr Taylor’s Gleaner column on Sunday, I silently wished that the quote above was not just in passing but part of an extended diagnosis of a too-neglected factor behind the origin and growth of gun violence in Jamaica.
So we tacitly acquit some of our politicians of complicity with gunrunning and gang violence while we level asinine charges against the Church concerning the moral state of the country.
We may not be able to prove it in a court of law, but a good number of us in Jamaica know the politicians who win and retain seats by gun violence. It remains a truism that careful diagnosis must precede helpful prognosis, so let’s do just that and call a spade a spade. Politicians are not the sole contributors to
Let’s be politically correct in the better sense and call out the politicians we know continue to benefit from, and so encourage, gun violence. Why are we letting them off the hook and see them as respectable societal leaders when they are really despots and bandits?
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